Friday and Saturday

Jan. 28 and 29, 2011
8 p.m.

This performance celebrates women’s contributions to the classic Caribbean art form of Calypso – a musical world traditionally dominated by men. Three prominent women of the genre – Singing Saundra, Queen Fayola and Princess Kizzie – will perform their celebrated form with a unique twist. All three have won hosts of awards and regularly place in the finals of Calypso competitions during Carnival and year-round in Trinidad.

Sleepless Night takes over Miami Beach again this year on November 7, 2009. It will go from sunset on the 7th to daybreak on the 8th- approximately 13 hours of art, installations, performances, and public interaction.

“From 6:00 p.m. on Saturday, November 7, 2009, until 7:00 a.m. the next morning, Miami Beach will stay up all night with more than 150 free arts and entertainment events presented at 80 different locations throughout the city. Over 100,000 people of all ages will enjoy free museum admissions, indoor and outdoor art installations and performances, architectural tours, dance (and dancing,) theater, music, slam poetry, film, video, fashion, acrobatics, comedy and more, including several unique collaborations and South Florida and world premieres. The City of Miami Beach collaborates with every cultural institution in the city, and with numerous other organizations, businesses and individuals to ensure that Audi Sleepless Night includes all aspects and points of view of what we collectively call “the arts.” Free shuttle buses with onboard arts programming connect the four zones of activity and remote parking for the full 13-hour night.”

Low is a one-woman tour-de-force by Rha Goddess, a regular at the Nu Yorican Poets Café, that cuts to the core of the harrowing world of mental illness. In her contagious and rhythmic style of “floetry, ” The Goddess delivers breathtakingly savage monologues that take you right inside the mind of a creative young girl who is spiraling into madness, as live-feed video and film projection draw you in further with an almost unbearable intimacy. Serious issues are tackled with the authenticity of an activist. More than just an artistic performance, Low is a seismic wake-up call that is long overdue.

In the play, Thompson plays generations of characters primarily based on herself, her family and the other African-Americans and Caribbean immigrants with whom they came in closest contact (and conflict) in the struggling, vibrant and politically charged Miami neighborhood of Liberty City from the late 1960s on.

Here are a couple of quotes I found intriguing from the article:

“too much political theater gets locked into preaching to the converted. But it doesn’t have to. As long as you use the central tool of empathy. That’s how you make good theater, and theater for people who may not know about the things you’re dealing with.” – Jessica Blank

“What so much of the theater of politics is missing is the artistic part.” -April Yvette Thompson

It’s great that a play like this has been written and is now on stage. Now, when is it coming to Miami?

THE Belgian choreographer Frédéric Flamand has staged dances in empty swimming pools, abandoned churches and steel mills. “I like to explore nontraditional spaces,” he says. His interest in the body’s relationship to the spaces it inhabits has led him, in recent years, to collaborations with some of the brightest stars in architecture: Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Jean Nouvel, Thom Mayne and Zaha Hadid.

The word space crops up as frequently in Mr. Flamand’s conversation as it does in that of the outspoken Ms. Hadid, the 2004 Pritzker Prize winner and his collaborator on “Metapolis II.” A kaleidoscopic high-tech vision of a utopian city in the new millennium, the 70-minute work is to have its North American premiere on Wednesday during the Lincoln Center Festival. The work was first performed in 2000 as “Metapolis,” then renamed after Mr. Flamand rechoreographed it for the National Ballet of Marseille, which he has directed since 2004.

An experimental dance maker known for his preoccupation with cities, technology and mixing art forms, Mr. Flamand, 60, approached Ms. Hadid, 56, in 1999 after admiring her kinetic designs. “Zaha’s architecture is based on movement,” he said in a recent phone interview from London. “She creates a very fluid space and continuous transformation. We wanted to make the dancers dance, of course, but to make the space dance too.”